Hard Knocks tcfs-3

by Zoe Sharp

  “You look deep in your thoughts,” he said, grinning. “I was just offering you a penny for them. Did old Figgis come over too graphic on the blood and guts front today?”

  I smiled back. “No, he was very restrained,” I said. “Hardly anybody fainted.”

  He hitched his hip onto the table next to me, made himself at home. “You don’t strike me as the fainting kind of girl,” he said. He eyed me momentarily over the rim of his mug as he took a swig of his drink.

  I waited a beat, then said sweetly, “I was talking about the blokes.”

  The instructor’s grin grew wider.

  Now, I thought, would be a good time to ask my awkward questions. “You said this morning that there’d never been an accident on the range.”

  “That’s right,” Rebanks said smartly. “And I aim to keep it that way, which is why I don’t appreciate pillocks like Mr Lloyd.”

  “I did hear,” I said, as offhand as I could manage, “that there was something that had happened recently. That somebody was killed out here?”

  “Where did you hear that?” Rebanks tensed, then took a drink of his coffee, making a real effort to relax.

  I shrugged. “It was just a rumour.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a touch of bitterness about him, “and we know how easy those start.”

  “So,” I said, “any truth in it?”

  He shook his head, but his body language shouted that he was lying. “Nah. You don’t want to believe all the gossip you hear.”

  Undeterred, I tried a different tack. “So, is it true we’ll be firing Hydra-Shok hollowpoints on the range next time?”

  “What?” Rebanks said, his voice almost a yelp. He swallowed before he went on, more calmly, “Waste good stuff on you lot? No chance. Where did you hear that?”

  “Oh, someone mentioned it, that’s all,” I said, waving another vague hand in the direction of just about everyone else in the room.

  “Well they’re talking bollocks,” Rebanks said firmly. “We don’t have any in the armoury.”

  There was a pause, then he turned the tables on me. “So,” he said, “you did pretty good this morning. Where did you learn to shoot?”

  I laid my knife and fork on my empty plate and pushed it away from me slightly before replying. “I did a bit at a local gun club – before they closed it down, obviously,” I said.

  “No military stuff then?” he asked, voice a shade too casual.

  Physically, I sat still but mentally, I jumped. What had I done to give myself away?

  My mind threw a rocky excuse together with all the care and skill of a third-rate cowboy builder. “We’ve an army camp with an outdoor range near where I live,” I said. “I went there once to see if I fancied joining the Territorials and we had a go with nine-mil pistols.” I shrugged. “I enjoyed that, but I didn’t fancy the weekend soldier bit much.”

  He nodded. “I thought you’d done some before,” he said. “You’ve got some promise, Charlie. Bit inconsistent maybe, but I reckon we could do something with you. A few more weeks here and you could be quite a passable shot.”

  For a woman. I heard those extra words. Even though his lips didn’t move and no sound came out.

  Blakemore paused by the side of us then. “The boss wants you for a team briefing,” he told Rebanks, jerking his head towards the door from the dining hall. He passed a dark gaze over me, as though I’d been the one who’d stopped Rebanks to chat.

  The weapons’ instructor gave me a last grin and tilted back the last of his coffee before getting lazily to his feet. “Be seeing ya,” he said with a wink.

  But the two of them exchanged words before they reached the doorway and Blakemore turned back to lance me with a brooding stare before he followed the other man out.

  I watched the two of them leave with a sense of foreboding that tightened my chest. I’d tried to be low key. I’d tried not to stand out from the crowd. Hell, I’d gone out of my way to miss the target. How on earth was that showing promise?

  I got to my feet and dumped my plate with the pile of dirty crockery in one of the plastic bowls to one side of the room. Then I went slowly upstairs wondering what I’d learned, and at what cost?

  ***

  I decided not to risk the roof again as my location to call Sean that night. Instead I went out onto the terrace, down the steps to one side, and walked across the rough car park where we’d first practised our driving drills. I ended up enveloped by the shadow of the trees on the far side.

  From there I could see the whole of the rear of the Manor laid out in front of me, the windows streaming light into multiple shadows across the ground. It was quiet out there, removed from civilisation and cold enough for my breath to cloud in front of me.

  And if Gilby came this way again I would see him – and his stealthy follower – long before he saw me.

  At least, that was the theory.

  Sean’s mobile was on divert to a land-line, which he answered on the fourth ring. His voice when he picked up was lazy, relaxed. In the background a soaring choir of voices swelled and broke. Either Sean had his stereo system wound up or he was hosting a very unusual house party.

  “Hang on Charlie,” he said, “let me just turn this down.”

  I heard him lay the receiver down onto a hard surface with a click, just as the main soprano took flight in the background. The male and female chorale swept in behind her, creating a rush of emotion, an overwhelming wrench of sadness. Then the voices died and were lost, and all I could hear were Sean’s returning footsteps.

  “Sounds cheery,” I said dryly.

  “It’s a John Rutter requiem piece, so I don’t think it’s supposed to be,” he said. “I was looking after a guy in the States last year who was really into it. When you’ve heard it night and day for a month you either grow to love it or hate it.”

  He paused and I knew I should have brushed the comment aside and got on with my report, all business, no personal asides, but I found I couldn’t do it.

  The stark realisation surfaced that I needed this brief snatch of respite with Sean. I’d missed the reassurance of his voice, even at the other end of a phone line, hundreds of miles away, from another country.

  It was not an admission that made me proud.

  “Don’t apologise,” I said now, recognising his hint of embarrassment that I’d caught him listening to classical music. “It sounds interesting. You’ll have to let me have a listen to the whole thing when I get back.” And just so he didn’t think I’d let him off the hook entirely, I added, “I wouldn’t have put you down as being into that kind of thing.”

  He laughed softly and batted that one straight back, a return blow that made me squirm. “Well, Charlie, as I recall when we were together we spent more time making music than listening to it.”

  Memories came bursting up along with his words, fragments of other times and places. A host of stolen moments, always in a hurry, always against the clock. We’d never had time just to be together. Never had the chance to find out if we fitted anywhere else except in bed.

  Haste and secrecy had brought us together in a shower of sparks, with a kind of emotional violence that had left me shaken to the centre. I’d never experienced anything like it, before or since.

  Especially not since.

  I was glad of the darkness, and that I was alone in it. I blushed scarlet to the point where I could warm my chilled fingers on the heat coming off my face. I stuttered some incomprehensible reply and hurried the conversation on.

  Across my babble Sean asked, “So how did it go on the range today?” I could still hear the amusement in his voice.

  “Interesting,” I said, thankful to be on safer ground, and I told him about my discovery.

  As I spoke I took the round out of my pocket and turned it over in my fingers. There was just enough light bleeding into the trees from the house to be able to make out the bullet’s cylindrical shape and the characteristic notched hole in the nose.

&nbs
p; “There isn’t a good reason I can think of for Gilby to be using Hydra-Shoks,” Sean said, all trace of that teasing humour wiped out of his voice. “OK so they tend to ricochet less, and they don’t go through body armour as easily—”

  “Which would be useful to us if we happened to be wearing any,” I interrupted.

  “Which you’re not,” Sean agreed. “Gilby just wouldn’t be using them for training. Hollowpoints generally don’t load as freely, so you tend to get more stoppages, not to mention they’re too expensive to waste on target practice. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Unless he’s using them to get rid of people who get in his way,” I said, my voice grim. “Did you make any headway finding out what Gilby might have to hide?”

  “We’re still working on it,” he said. “How did you get on today anyway? Did you shoot sloppy?”

  “Sort of,” I said, remembering again those three closely-grouped rounds when I hadn’t been paying enough attention. Had that little lapse been enough for them to rumble me? “Not sloppy enough, it would seem. I’m not sure what I did, but Rebanks asked me this evening if I’d ever done any military shooting.”

  Sean sucked in his breath. “What did you tell him?”

  I repeated my TA story then asked, anxious, “Is there any way he can check up on that?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Sean said slowly. “Hang on.” He must have put his hand over the receiver. There was the sound of muffled voices in the background, but I couldn’t catch the other one clearly. “I’ve just got Madeleine onto it.”

  “She’s working late,” I said. I didn’t think I brought anything sharp to the statement, but I must have been wrong about that.

  Sean sighed. “It’s just work, Charlie,” he said, but his voice was gentle. “You should know that by now.”

  “OK,” I said, aiming for a level tone, off-hand. The logical half of my brain recognised the truth of it. The emotional half sulked and glowered and stuck its bottom lip out. I slapped it down. “Have you found out any more about these kidnappings?”

  “Not much,” Sean said. “The last kid to be taken before they snatched Heidi Krauss was a Russian businessman’s son. He disappeared about three weeks before she did, on his way home from school. They forced the car off the road, shot the bodyguard who was driving, and burnt the wreckage with him still in it. They had to identify the guy from his dental records. The kid’s fifteen. He’s still missing.”

  “Gregor Venko again?”

  “Hmm, possibly,” Sean said, but there was a hint of doubt in his tone. “I’ve been reading his profile and if it is Venko who’s behind these kidnappings then it’s not his usual style. He’s always been ruthless, but this is beyond that. It’s nasty. Vicious.”

  I realised I was still turning the round over and over in my fingers like a worry bead. I slipped it back into my pocket.

  “D’you think there’s any connection with what happened to Kirk and these kidnappings?” I wondered aloud. “Do we know what kind of weapons the kidnappers were using?”

  “Machine pistols,” Sean said, “But that doesn’t prove much. The close protection team were using something very similar.”

  “The same type of weapon used to kill Kirk.” A cold little ghost scuffed its feet all the way down my spine. “Are you sure he might not have been involved in some way?”

  “Salter was many things Charlie, but I don’t think he’d quite lowered himself to criminal status,” Sean shot back. “Besides, just about every thug in eastern Europe can pick up a machine pistol and a box of Hydra-Shoks these days. It’s common. I wouldn’t read too much into it if I were you.”

  “Nevertheless, we know that there is some connection between the Manor and Kirk’s death, and whatever’s going on here they might be prepared to kill to keep it covered. Bearing that in mind,” I went on with a studied mildness, “you might want to get Madeleine onto another little research topic before you finally send her home for the night.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, if this all goes pear-shaped,” I said, my voice calm and even, “how do you propose to get me out of here?”

  Eight

  Gilby didn’t show.

  After I’d finished talking to Sean I waited for another forty minutes before the cold finally got the better of me and I sloped back into the Manor.

  I ran into Jan in the hallway. She had her cigarette packet and lighter in her hand, and had obviously just been out onto the terrace for a crafty smoke. We compared our reddened noses and whitened fingers.

  “I keep threatening to give up the soddin’ cancer sticks and if this doesn’t make me, nothing’s going to,” she muttered. She checked her watch. “I’ve got my name down for the pool table in five minutes. D’you fancy a quick game?”

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll just dump my jacket and I’ll see you down in the mess hall.”

  The mess hall had once been another of the Manor’s elegant drawing rooms, now stripped bare except for a tatty selection of easy chairs and a ripped and faded snooker table with a downward slope towards the bottom left-hand corner pocket.

  On the far side of the room was a darts board of similar vintage. The wall around it was pockmarked like a woodworm-infested beam as a testament to people’s general inability to throw a straight arrow. Looking at just how far away some of the holes were from the board itself, it was quite scary to realise that the same people were also given guns and expected to shoot straight.

  Jan was setting up the pool balls in their plastic triangle by the time I arrived. She’d helped herself to coffee from the hulking vending machine that lurked in one corner and she offered me a cup.

  I shook my head. I’d made the mistake of trying the coffee it dispensed early on. It turned out to be tasteless thin grey sludge with peculiar thermal properties which meant it was either so hot it burned your tongue or stone cold, without seeming to pass through any other temperature on the way.

  Jan broke the pack with an aggressive thwack of the cue, scattering the balls in all directions, but not managing to pocket any. She reached for the crumbling cube of blue chalk as she stepped back.

  I walked round the table with my eyes on the lie of the balls. There was an easy stripe near the middle pocket, but the others were in difficult positions. I chose a more difficult spot instead, lurking close to the bottom cushion. I was lucky, and I nudged it just far enough to topple into the pocket, wiping its feet on the way in.

  “Nice shot,” Jan said.

  “Luck rather than judgement, I’m afraid,” I said, bending to see if I could just squeeze the cue ball past the black without a foul.

  “So, I hear you work in a gym,” she said as I tried it. The white cleared the black by a fraction and a second spot dropped in.

  “Yeah,” I said as I straightened up. “Personal training, stuff like that.”

  “Not aerobics, then?” Jan said, and there was just a trace of a sneer in her voice.

  It made me unwilling to admit to having taken such classes in the past. Besides, the gym where I’d been working during much of the previous year had not been the kind of place you’d imagine anyone skipping around in shocking pink lycra.

  The lads who went there were all seriously into training hard with the biggest weights they could lift without rupturing themselves. Getting them to do proper warm-up stretches was as close as I ever came to introducing any form of aerobic exercise.

  “No,” I said, flicking her a quick smile. “I just sort out people’s weight programmes and keep my eye on their technique.” I failed to give my next shot enough pace and the slant of the table had it rolling way wide of the mark.

  “So they listen to you OK, do they?” Jan asked, her tone dubious. “They don’t give you any shit because you’re a woman?” She was a canny enough player to leave the easy stripe over the pocket it was covering and pot another instead, putting plenty of backspin on the cue ball to bring it back up to the top of the table for her next shot.
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  “Not really, no,” I said. Maybe it was because my boss was built like Schwarzenegger and always backed me up, right or wrong. Or maybe it was because all the regulars had seen the scar round my neck at one point or another, and between themselves had exaggerated the rumours about how it got there. Either way, I didn’t get many clients who were prepared to argue with me.

  “You’re lucky.” Jan put another two stripe balls away with gutsy determination. “I qualified as an engineer. Got a fucking good degree, too. Better than half the guys I was working with, but you try telling that to most of the macho numskulls and they just pat you on the backside and send you off to make the tea.” As she spoke she let her eyes slide across to where the blokes were playing darts with much loud laughter and matey camaraderie.

  I wondered how much of the attitude Jan had experienced was down to her combative stance. You have to show people you know what you’re talking about, not just tell them. Besides, she was too touchy, too perfect a target for winding up. I could understand why they hadn’t been able to resist the temptation.

  She miscued her next shot completely and nearly snookered me. I was just about to try and play a tricky bounce off the far cushion when Major Gilby walked in.

  The Einsbaden staff had their own mess hall in a different part of the building. Separate and segregated. For any of them to venture into the students’ area was unusual enough to cast the conversation adrift and bring all play to a standstill.

  Gilby looked round at the silenced faces. He was frowning, as though in disapproval of the fact that he’d caught us relaxed and relaxing. His gaze seemed to linger in my direction. For a moment I wondered if he’d spotted me waiting for him out there in the tree-line and had changed his plans accordingly. If that was so, evidently it hadn’t pleased him much.

  In his hand was a piece of paper. He glanced down at it.

  “We’ve had an alteration to tomorrow’s schedule,” he said, his voice deceptively mild. The kind of tone that doctors use when they say, “This won’t hurt.” It provoked an instant ripple of distrust and uneasiness.